Four for Four for Four, Weekly Reel #37
I watched and rated all four films this week four out of five stars. A classic American auteur rose above the rest, but I also had fun with French, Iranian, and Australian filmmakers.
News of the Week: “House of the Dragon” is premiering its final episode tonight. That means I’ll be going into television hibernation until season two in ‘24 or whatever Nathan Fielder awkwardly fingers next.
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The Player (1992, Robert Altman, USA) is what happens when an American auteur is shunned by Hollywood for a decade, then makes a triumphant middle-finger return. Although both sides did the shunning—eighties Hollywood wasn’t interested in auteurs, and neither were the auteurs interested in return—Robert Altman kept his integrity and waited patiently. After the years he was reinventing stale Hollywood genres with films like McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971, western) and The Long Goodbye (1973, crime noir), Altman turned to independent and small production companies to continue filmmaking, on his terms. What newly corporatized Hollywood studios wanted were marketable qualities, like “Suspense, laughter, violence. Hope, heart, nudity, sex. Happy endings. Mainly happy endings.”
That was smugly inserted by Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins), protagonist of The Player and Hollywood studio executive in charge of choosing story pitches to produce. Since he only picks twelve of fifty-thousand submissions per year, he’s made an enemy out of forty-nine thousand, nine hundred and eighty-eight screenwriters. One of the forty-nine thousand, nine hundred and eighty-eight has been sending Mill postcards of classic HW films with life-threatening messages. Already stressed with a possible replacement from Fox gunning for his spot, Mill decides to track him/her down and offer a deal. Through the post Mill finds out that the sender is David Kahane (a skinny Vincent D'Onofrio), a chagrined screenwriter, whom Mill had ghosted six months earlier after hearing the pitch. Mill calls his home, reaches his girlfriend June Gudmundsdottir (played by Greta Scacchi; Gudmundsdottir, or in Icelandic, Guðmundsdóttir, is also the surname of Björk), who tells Mill that Kahane is at the Rialto in Pasadena. Mill goes, hoping to mend their relations, but Kahane isn’t in the mood. They get into an accidental scuffle, which leads to Mill quasi-accidentally—somewhere between second-degree murder and manslaughter—killing Kahane. Thus ends the first act, which transitions into the second, where Mill comes to terms with the killing (spoiler: he didn’t get the right man), is politely stalked by Pasadena PD, and feels more than friendship for Gudmundsdottir.
It makes sense that The Player won Best Director and Best Actor at Cannes. Altman had complete control over his satirical take on an eighties HW studio, one that he had pitched scripts to and were rejected because they weren’t going to star Julia Robert or Bruce Willis—another joke made in the film that leads to a pants-peeing funny ending. The mood of the black comedy satire was established in the first shot of the film, which lasted almost eight minutes. It gravitated outside the main executive offices of the studio, which showed Mill inside receiving pitches, his girlfriend (a script editor) and her assistant and other production members scrambling outside and inside, and several of the sixty-five cameos made by celebrities—Altman could pull. From this shot alone, Altman proved he was back while also making a statement of revanche.
Robbins (b. 1958) excellently played a crazed exec turned erotic thriller lead and back again. This role came during his golden era—1990 to 1995, but with a hiccup in 2003—of critically-acclaimed performances. One must also point out the talent in the cast overall (from Scacchi and D'Onofrio to Whoopi Goldberg and Cynthia Stevenson), including the cameos, which made Robbins elevation above them even more impressive. They were filmed and lit excellently by Jean Lépine and spliced together by Geraldine Peroni, who received an Oscar nod for this film (and died while editing Brokeback Mountain).
This film might be good for those of you who haven’t gotten on with Altman yet. It’s accessible because it makes fun of an industry everyone knows. Then I highly recommend going back to his genre-heavy seventies work, which will unfortunately show you why HW wasn’t interested in making good films in the eighties. The Player is playing on HBO Max (alongside McCabe & Mrs. Miller), The Long Goodbye is on Kanopy, M*A*S*H is on Apple TV+, and you can find out more here.
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Anaïs in Love (2021, Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet, France) is a French rom-com, meaning a woman falls in love with both an older man and his wife. Almost everything that happens in its slim ninety-eight minute runtime is some form of French cliché dialed up: neurotic female protagonist studying 17th century descriptions of passion, semi-famous Parisian publisher and writer married couple, tasteful nudity, shoot-on-the-go aesthetics, and the (French film commission contractually obligated) anti-capitalist playwright.
The film follows, hastily, Anaïs (Anaïs Demoustier), who spends two-thirds of it running in dresses. In the beginning she’s running to her apartment to meet her landlady, then she’s running to a party, and later sprints to meet her boyfriend at the cinema. She’s late to all three. Her hastiness results in a form of modern ennui that makes her prone to falling behind. In this case, it’s love, which comes after her breakup with her boyfriend and low-key rebound with an older man. Neither of the men could keep up, so Anaïs opts for the man’s wife, Emilie (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), a writer of some acclaim. It’s hard to determine whether Anaïs’s attraction is infatuation with an older (slower) version of herself, or the more legitimate expression of love that one stumbles upon from running so often. (There’s some indication when she bangs her knee when first meeting the older man, which slows her down for once.) But let’s not get too far into the plot.
In her debut feature, Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet is staking a position for herself in the international Millennial rom-com. Anaïs Demoustier, doing her best Renate Reinsve or Dakota Johnson, parachutes into every scene with tenderness and a type of social insecurity masked as bravado. Noé Bach’s cinematography was the co-star of the film. Every shot had the beautifully melancholy shine of early Autumn, that time when romance falls into tragedy (Anaïs’s mother has recurrent cancer) but too far away from the satire of winter and halfway around the calendar from comedy. Bach picked up on how to shoot the frenzy of Anaïs’s interior and exterior, which sometimes ran into each other with exponential growth. Unfortunately, the film didn’t receive a great distribution—blame covid—but since Magnolia Pictures picked it up, you can view Bach’s exquisite imagery on Hulu.
A Hero (2021, Asghar Farhadi, Iran/France) is Farhadi’s latest release in which he gets as close to fellow countryman Kiarostami’s style of filmmaking as possible. The story is about a real life incident in Shiraz where a man returns a bag of cash he found while on leave from a debtor’s prison. Like Kiarostami, but not using the same people involved irl, Farhadi closely filmed that story. But that’s not all. Farhadi takes it one step further and seems to have gotten the idea based on a project he assigned a documentary film student in one of his classes. The student, Azadeh Masihzadeh, made the documentary about this exact incident in Shiraz using news reports and interviews, which Farhadi was overseeing. Then, a few years later, Farhadi, without Masihzadeh’s knowledge, shopped the story around at an international film event in Berlin, which attracted producers. He made the film, this film A Hero, without crediting Masihzadeh. It premiered at Cannes in 2021, won the Grand Prix award, then Farhadi and Masihzadeh sued one another. As far as I can tell, the legal disputes are ongoing. (But this begs the question, would Masihzadeh have sued if the film bombed?)
Nonetheless rafiqấ, A Hero is another brilliant entry into the internationally acclaimed filmography of Farhadi and modern Persian filmmaking—the best of the ME. Amir Jadidi plays Rahim Soltani, the man on leave who returns the money bag, with a lot of sentimental sincerity. Farhadi purposefully portrays him as the hero with flaws, but without displaying enough of the flaws to limit his depiction as a hero. We watch him take the money to a gold dealer to find out the value, and since it’s not enough to pay off the deposit of his creditor, he then decides to return it. Sus but not inhuman. Aside from a physical altercation later, Soltani makes tough decisions, many of which are forced on him by outside influences saving face. And he does have a sympathetic past: he went into debt to open a store, but his partner stole the money and left town. He also has a secret girlfriend, who is used to deceive an agency that was attempting to verify the story, which was Soltani’s final crafty maneuver. The point is, Soltani is displayed as a hero, but the story underneath says otherwise. Is any hero perfect though?
That’s what Farhadi does over and over in his films. The characters are complicated with so many gray area actions that nobody is good or evil. We all have a little bit of both. And sometimes circumstances force us into one position or another against our better judgement. This story departs from Farhadi’s usual plots about class and religion to talk about idolization and ethics. You can make up your own opinion about Soltani’s situation by streaming the film via Prime Video.
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003, Peter Weir, USA) had the unfortunate timing of having a release six months after Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and competing against The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King on the awards’ circuit. Enough to take the wind out of the sales, huh? Master and Commander was made by Peter Weir, Australian New Wave legend that later came to the USA and made Witness, Dead Poets Society, and The Truman Show. What made Weir interesting was being, as Ethan Hawke said, “a popular artist,” meaning a director that appealed popularly but had artistic merit—what a concept! But, also according to Hawke, who Weir had directed in Dead Poet’s Society, working with diva actors like Russell Crowe and Johnny Depp made the filmmaking process a burden for Weir, so he retired a decade ago.
Master and Commander, one of the films that “broke” Weir (pronounced like “beer”), is an unpretentious period war film. It takes place during the Napoleonic Wars, where a lesser British ship captained by Jack Aubrey (Crowe) is after a French frigate in the South Atlantic, and then, minor spoilers, the South Pacific. The film, based on a series of novels by Patrick O'Brian about the adventures of Aubrey and his totally non-homoerotic relationship with the ship’s doctor, is simply the pursuit of ships that tests the resolve of the loyal seamen and ambitions of Captain Aubrey. It’s a straightforward story of men (there are literally no women) against the elements, survival of the fittest and so on. I liked it. It’s available to stream on HBO Max.
Pass
Nothing this week!
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